At home, at school, in the workplace, in the community – no matter where we are, our lives are spent crossing paths with all sorts of people. Some encounters are delightful and some are trying – you might come across someone wonderful, while at other times you might get tied up with someone more difficult. But our encounters with people and the effect they have on us are no mere act of chance. The universe carefully selects one person for another person and sends us the person most suited to our needs.
Let's say
you have an impossibly horrible boss. You take your work seriously and keep
your head down and they don't even glance your way. Then, if you make one tiny
little mistake or something doesn't go the way they want, it gets blown completely
out of proportion and you get screamed at, being reprimanded and blamed for it.
“They're so mean!”, you think to yourself, but, face to face, the words just
aren't there. And so you tremblingly get back to work lest the heavens open up
on you again and if they start screaming at you again, you end up cowering like
a child...
People outside the situation might
want to say
Why
would you stay in a place like that?
You
can't just put up with this kind of abuse!
Why
wouldn’t you just quit?
But it’s hard to decide when you’re
in that situation whether or not you should just quit. Depending on the level
of “abuse”, there are a great many instances where you shouldn't just keep on
taking it. But with a lot of these types of situations, they’re a chance for
you to think about the meaning of your encounter.
The first thing you might realise is
that similar episodes occurred in your childhood: perhaps a father who didn't acknowledge
you, a mother with a quick temper, or a grandfather that everyone was afraid of.
When we were kids, we were powerless, but now that we're grownups we can
overcome those very same situations. It's for that reason that that boss
entered your life.
Perhaps your dad has already passed
away and it's too hard to patch things up with your elderly mum. But in place
of those relationships, you just might be able to work on your relationship
with this boss. The people that we encounter in our lives are just like the
characters in a play. One after another, the right person comes along at just
the right time, all to help us grow up. So, this mean, impossible, simply awful
boss is also a kind of teacher who is there that you might learn something.
So, the next step is.......
We take hold of this “not being
acknowledged” thing, and actually think about it - Why might my boss not appreciate
me, even though I’m completely, desperately, throwing myself 100% into my work?
The first part of the answer might be “Well, my dad was like that too” and deep
within that, well hidden, lies the key. It's that, in actual fact, we don't even
acknowledge us ourselves.
Maybe you’re a complete perfectionist
and can't tolerate the idea of slipping up. Or maybe from the get go, you have
absolutely no faith in your own abilities and hate yourself for that. It’s not
easy to accept ourselves exactly as we are and we tend to judge ourselves about
the parts of ourselves that we think are bad or that we don't like. And so,
that boss is merely a reflection of the things about ourselves that we hate and
our not appreciating ourselves.
The same thing happened with the man
I married. There were things that were great and things I found challenging,
exactly (I later realised...) like my mother. He was quick, good with his
hands, creative, and had a great sense of style, just like my mother. He
acknowledged my abilities and was someone who I could have fun working
alongside, whooping with laughter the whole time.
The flipside of course being.......
He was emotional and would all
of a sudden get into these bad moods and then he’d just blow up...just like
her....The marriage turned sour and while I was thinking about it and all the
advice I was getting, I realised that I'd met this man so that I could deal
with my relationship with my mother. So, not only did I want to get to a place
where I could say to him all the things that I couldn't say when face to face
with my mother, I also began to think about why I encounter people like this.
I realised that I was totally unaware
of my own needs; I was getting pushed down and down and down by their emotional
needs and wasn't taking care of my own. It was a system wherein I wasn't taking
care of my own emotional needs myself and so neither my mother nor my husband
would take care of them for me.
I even believe that my soul chose my
mother as the character in the play that is my life best able to get me to
learn that “I need to take care of myself!” Then, since I didn’t manage to learn
that lesson when I was a child, my soul chose for my husband someone who could
teach me that same lesson…that’s why I met him. So my heartfelt thanks goes out
to these invaluable teachers, my mother and my ex-husband.
Next time, when you meet someone
difficult, maybe you can probe into the forces at work there. And the good news
is that once you've properly learnt that lesson and “graduated”, you'll cease
to come into contact with people who are similarly difficult. You might not be
able to believe this until you actually experience it for yourself, but lessons
like these, flowing out from the providence of the universe, are simple and
reliable.
So really there’s nothing to worry about. Just like with a play being
performed on stage, take a step back once in a while and take a look through
the audience's eyes - by doing so you can just float on through.
[The original article in Japanese 「出会い」was posted in Nov 2011, which you can find here.]
